


Nayru's Love

by Closeface



Category: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Amnesia, Domestic, Exes, F/F, Healing from trauma, Mute Link (Legend of Zelda), Post-Canon, Post-Game(s), Slice of Life, Trans Link, ganon defeated, trans girl Link
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-21 23:31:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15568764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Closeface/pseuds/Closeface
Summary: The Calamity has been defeated, and as far as the world knows, Link and Zelda are dead. Two women, once noble colleagues, confidantes, lovers, now strangers, emerge from the wreckage of Hyrule Castle and take refuge in the Hero's house in Hateno Village. They bury the ghosts of their past and learn to live again after one hundred years of suffering. Or they try.*In this fic, Link is a trans woman, and is consistently referred to with she/her pronouns.





	Nayru's Love

A hero rode into Hateno Village with the sunrise, her princess’s arms looped weakly around her waist. Just hours before, the princess’s return was heralded in the death of an ancient evil and an explosion of light seen throughout the continent. There was no royal welcome for her when she returned. For all anyone knew, Zelda and Link had died along with the Calamity Ganon, a sacrifice felt by few, expected by many.

  
By the time the two women arrived, the village had celebrated itself into a placid stupor, the comatose calm after the storm of a party over a century in the making. No one saw the couple ride in on a white horse bearing the royal crest. No one saw the bright blue light of the Myahm Agana Shrine reflected in the vacant eyes of a century-old princess or her most faithful knight. No one saw them enter the house that once belonged to the Hero of the Wild, locking the door behind them.

They worked wordlessly, perfectly in sync. Link removed the royal saddle and bridle from the white horse outside and stuffed the gear into a burlap sack, then tied it tightly with a rope. She saddled Nayru with the free riding set from the Dueling Peaks Stable and hauled the sack back out of the village, dumped it into the river. When she got back, the princess had changed into a peasant woman’s clothes and had cut her hair into a messy approximation of a pixie cut. Gently burning in the fireplace was the blue tunic Zelda had worn throughout her captivity in Hyrule Castle.

She looked up in alarm at the sound of the door opening, and readied the fire poker in her hand like a lance. Link raised her hands up, palms out, in mock surrender. _It’s me, I am no threat to you._

“I’m sorry,” Zelda whispered for the first time in one hundred years. “I’m still a little on edge.”

Link nodded and took her place by the fire, a healthy distance away from the princess. The two sat and watched the fire burn for a while.

Zelda broke the silence. “You’re filthy,” she said, and moved closer to the hero. “All caked with mud and dirt and blood. We need to get you out of those clothes.”

She brushed the hair out of Link’s face with all the tenderness and familiarity of a woman whose lover has returned from a long-raging war. Zelda slid closer to Link on the bench, her fingers alighted on the other woman’s shoulders. She missed her so much. She never thought she would be free to love her again, to hold her and be held again, to-

There was the frantic thudding of many scrambling limbs as Link tried to slip farther from the princess and fell off the unexpected edge of the bench.

“Link!” Zelda’s first reaction was to stand up, reach out, try to help, but her touch was what had caused this mess in the first place. Her hand hovered awkwardly in the growing space between them, and there was nothing she could do.

Link sat up on the floor, propping her back against the table so she could comfortably sign. _What are you doing?_

Zelda stuttered. She signed, _I missed you._

Link did not respond.

“I- I- I, I missed you,” Zelda said aloud, as if saying it twice would make a difference.

_Okay._

“Didn’t… didn’t you miss me?”

After a long pause. _I don’t remember. You. I don’t remember you. A lot._ Link sighed, frustrated with herself. _I don’t remember a lot about you._

“So… what do you remember?”

_I was your knight. I was asleep for one hundred years. The ghost of your father told me the world was in danger. Asked me to save you. Sent me to an old woman. A lot of people told me about their memories of me. And then I defeated Ganon and here we are._

_From the moment I woke up, I knew that there was someone that I wanted to save. I didn’t know that someone was you for a long time. And then I did. Because someone told me it was. And, in my head, I knew we were close, but I didn’t feel it in my heart. And when I found out that saving Hyrule meant saving you, I knew I didn’t have a choice. For Hyrule. For me. And then for you._

_It’s not that I don’t have any memories of you at all, it’s just. Patchy. Incomplete. And it’s not- I’m scared that it’s not all mine. A lot of people told me I should miss you. And I did. But why?_

_I don’t know why. I’m sorry._

“Oh,” said Zelda in a voice barely above a whisper. “Okay.”

_I’m sorry. I think we were more intimate than I remembered before. I didn’t realize this was your expectation. I’m sorry._

Zelda smiled. “Don’t be, it’s not your fault. At all, really, I mean it. I shouldn’t have assumed.”

_I’m sorry._

“You really haven’t changed at all, have you?”

_You still remember me._

Was that a question or a statement? Zelda’s sign language was rusty. “Yes. I was awake the whole time. ”

 _You. You watched over me? So you saw everything?_ Link blushed bright red. She looked like she almost didn't want an answer.

“Well, maybe not ‘watch’ in the conventional sense. I didn’t really ‘see’ anything. It was more like… I sensed it? Or I knew about it? If that makes sense.”

_So did you see–_

“I’m not really in the mood to recount every one of the romantic trysts you’ve had over the year. But I can, if you really want me to. You really are quite popular with women, aren’t you?”

Link buried her face in her hands, mortified. Zelda can practically feel the heat radiating off her face, and she giggles.

“Oh, my l-” Stop. Try again. “I’m sorry. Link.”

_I’m sorry._

“No, I am the one who should be asking forgiveness. Please understand, even after all this time apart I feel like I have been making new memories with you. I need to be more mindful of that.”

_I’m sorry._

She wanted to reach out, hold both of those calloused hands in her own, stop their shaking, their incessant apologies, just like she might have a hundred years ago. She wanted to hold Link’s bruised knuckles to her lips and make her understand. There was nothing she did wrong. There was nothing she did wrong.

Zelda balled her hands into tight fists on her lap, knuckles white from the strain, and turned her attention to her slowly burning tunic. “We should probably discuss our future from here on out.”

Link stood slowly from her position on the floor, wincing at the pain in her joints. She wiped her hands on her pants and nodded emphatically.

But she could never hide her pain from Zelda, never well. The princess’s heart broke for her. For them both.

“But we can do that tomorrow. You should rest.”

Link didn’t like the way she was looking at her, like she was a sparrow with an arrowhead in her wing, helpless in her hands. She wanted so desperately to trust Zelda, to let her probe into her wound with deft fingers, to let her wade into the blood, dislodge the cold metal from her flesh and do the healing for her. But Link was not a sparrow, and there was no arrowhead in her wing, no wound to heal from.

Even so, she very much would have liked to sleep.

Link rummaged in one of her drawers for her spare pillow and her traveling cloak. She spread the cloak on the floor in front of fireplace and her pillow on top of it.

_Good night._

“What are you doing?”

_Sleeping._

“On the floor?”

_There’s only one bed._

“You’re not going to sleep on the floor!”

_Neither are you._

“That’s not fair.”

_It’s not. We’ll deal with it in the morning. Good night._

“How could you only have one bed in this house?”

_There was only one person living here._

“But didn’t you know I was coming?”

Link knew the many answers to that question, but she didn’t know which, if any, to tell her. No, actually. I thought you were dead. Or yes, I knew you were coming, but I thought I would have died in the battle or something. Or no, actually, I was more concerned with taking down the Calamity than the fact that I would have to sleep on the floor of my own house for a while after it was all over. Or I didn’t see a future where I lived up until this point. Or I didn’t see a future without the Calamity at all.

Link opted, instead, for a simple shrug.

Zelda sighed, annoyed. “Honestly, the little regard you have for your own comfort, the poor foresight you have to prepare for things… unbelievable.”

_Come on, princess. We both know how this ends. So go sleep in the bed tonight and we can fix it tomorrow._

Zelda couldn’t really argue with that. She went up the stairs to leave Link to get ready, only to realize there was no wall separating the upstairs bedroom from the downstairs area. She wasn’t worried about her own privacy or anything – Link was a good, chivalrous woman, a born knight. But Zelda was not.

She climbed into bed and found it difficult not to let her eyes stray down to Link’s resting place on the floor below her. She pulled her eyes away each time – it was a violation of trust, Link wasn’t ready to let her see her that way, and that was okay. But as she drifted off to sleep enveloped in the scent of the woman she loved (trying very, very hard to think it romantic and not kind of gross at how little Link washed her sheets), she caught glimpses of her behind her eyelids.

Link’s muffled giggles tickling her neck, teeth and breath. The biggest, gnarliest scar on her waist that tore across her guts and seemed to threaten to evert onto the bed, and how her body moved because of it, in spite of it. A mouthful of Link’s dirty blonde hair in the middle of the night, her back pressed close to Zelda’s chest, arms and legs tangled in silent “I love you, you mean everything to me”s, echoing, and echoing, and still.


End file.
